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Written by a teenage girl, who chose a teenage boy to narrate the story, The Outsiders describes the rivalry between two groups, divided by their social and economic circumstances. The book was instantly successful and remains so today, despite being challenged repeatedly for its depictions of violence, teenage drinking and smoking and juvenile crime. Set in Tulsa, Oklahoma in the mid-nineteen sixties, The Outsiders borrows liberally from cultural icons of its day. There are references to The Beatles and Elvis Presley. Scenes from the book are similar to West Side Story, where the Jets and the Sharks can be compared to The Outsiders Socs and Greasers. There are lines drawn from contemporary films; sixteen going on seventeen for example, used to describe a character, was the title of a song in the 1965 film, The Sound of Music. Although rather tame by the standards of today, (hard drugs and automatic weapons are conspicuously absent) the book continues to generate controversy for its descriptions of dysfunctional parents and broken homes. The book was written about teenagers from the perspective of a teenager and was immediately controversial as parents objected to its portrayals of teens coming from dysfunctional homes. Few parents appear in the book and when they do it is generally in an unflattering light. Numerous challenges to The Outsiders have resulted in its being banned from school curricula and libraries. Despite its controversy, The Outsiders was awarded The New York Herald Tribune Best Teenage Books Award in 1967, the year of its release. It has won numerous awards since and continues to sell nearly 500,000 copies a year, forty-five years after publication. It has been produced as a stage play, a major motion picture and a short-lived television series. It continues to be part of the curriculum for both middle school and high school in the United States.